Wordscores is a scaling model for estimating the positions (mostly of political actors) for dimensions that are specified a priori. Wordscores was introduced in Laver, Benoit and Garry (2003) and is widely used among political scientists.

We use manifestos of the 2013 and 2017 German federal elections. For the 2013 elections we assign the average expert evaluations from the 2014 Chapel Hill Expert Survey for the five major parties, and predict the party positions for the 2017 manifestos.